Sunday, April 22, 2012

One of the less glorious aspects of the EGU's politicking over recent years is the awarding of medals over the years to various anti-science emeriti. The latest of these is Vincent Courtillot whose name may be familiar to some (eg). As well as the climate science denialism, there is the arguably more serious episode of his acting as editor for vast numbers of papers from his institute at a journal, which is hard to square with the medal's reservation "for scientists who have achieved exceptional international standing in Solid Earth Geosciences, defined in their widest senses, for their merit and their scientific achievements" (my italics).

It seems that there has been a faction pushing for him to get the award for some time, apparently as a quid pro quo for some past deeds. Until now, his history has been sufficient for his nomination to be blocked, so this time they pushed the nomination through on the quiet. Gerald Ganssen has temporarily stepped down from any EGU-related activities in protest, and there has been talk of the break-up of the EGU. If any EGU participants feel like attending the plenary (there's a free lunch!) or the medal lecture itself, I'm sure some pointed questions could be asked...

38 comments:

I just read your previous post ("Have the sceptics taken over the asylum?") and I must say I am somewhat alarmed. You seem to be suggesting that climate change skeptics should be barred from receiving awards - even awards for work not related to their climate skepticism! How can you expect us (i.e. the public) to believe that scientists are genuinely free to express their ideas if respected scientists like you declare publicly that publication of heretical climate theories should disqualify scientists from awards?

Regarding Courtillot, Lindzen wrote in his essay, Climate science: Is it currently designed to answer questions? (2008),

Vincent Courtillot et al. (2007) encountered a similar problem. (Courtillot, it should be noted, is the director of the Institute for the Study of the Globe at the University of Paris.) They found that time series for magnetic field variations appeared to correlate well with temperature measurements – suggesting a possible non-anthropogenic source of forcing. This was immediately criticized by Bard and Delaygue (2008), and Courtillot et al. were given the conventional right to reply, which they did in a reasonably convincing manner. What followed, however, was highly unusual. Raymond Pierrehumbert (a professor of meteorology at the University of Chicago and a fanatical environmentalist) posted a blog supporting Bard and Delaygue, accusing Courtillot et al. of fraud, and worse. Alan Robock ... perpetuated the slander in a letter circulated to all officers of the American Geophysical Union. The matter was then taken up (in December of 2007) by major French newspapers (LeMonde, Liberation, and Le Figaro) that treated Pierrehumbert's defamation as fact. As in the previous case, all references to the work of Courtillot et al. refer to it as 'discredited' and no mention is made of their response. Moreover, a major argument against the position of Courtillot et al. is that it contradicted the claim of the IPCC.

I guess you might retort that of course a denier like Lindzen would defend a denier like Courtillot. On the other hand, your present post suggests that Lindzen is not alone.

Anyway, given how much rumour you have already published here would you be willing to spice it up even further with additional detail? :-) What is this 'faction'? We are usually told that climate change skeptics are as rare as hens' teeth, so the existence of a faction within the EGU supporting Courtillot comes to me as a surprise. Also, "quid pro quo for past deeds" sounds dark and corrupt. What are you saying here exactly?

Alex, his behaviour in acting as editor "for dozens of papers by IPGP colleagues published from 1992 to 2008 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters" is quite clearly unethical and arguably renders him unsuitable to receive of an honour such as the Arthur Holmes medal.

Do you think this is the sort of behaviour that we should hold up as exemplary to young scientists today?

James didn't say "objecting" nor "should have been barred" -- he earlier noted the awkwardness of making an award so late that the scientist has begun to go Lovelock on us. We'll all get that way if we live long enough. I read it more as a comment that honors ought to be given before, not during, a scientist's emeritus period.

Hank, Friis-Christensen is not an Emeritus Professor. He received his Ph.D. in 1971 which makes it likely he was in his early to mid 60s in 2009 when he received the award. And when he proposed the cosmic ray hypothesis with Henrik Svensmark in 1997 I would guess he was in his early 50s.

He's hardly gone as far as the septics represent in referring to his work.

He says he came up with a notion that might, if it can be detected, explain some changes in the period prior to the 1980s, before the big rise in temperature associated with CO2. It's a nice little effect if it can be detected. It's not a big one.__________________________

"... note that the causal relationship between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover suggested by Marsh and Svensmark (2000) would result in a correlation opposite to the one we find if the field geometry were axial and dipolar and this is precisely why we propose a mechanism of dipole tilt or non dipole geometry to interpret our observations....... part of the centennial-scale fluctuations in 14C production may have been influenced by previously unmodeled rapid dipole field variations. In any case, the relationship between climate, the Sun and the geomagnetic field could be more complex than previously imagined. And the previous points allow the possibility for some connection between the geomagnetic field and climate over these time scales....... “all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to what is required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures (...) over the past 20 years” see Lockwood and Fröhlich (2007). These are precisely some of the points we make in concluding our paper and this is what led us to enter the dangerous realm of global warming: temperature rises fast in the early part of the 20th century, when CO2 rises only slowly, dips when CO2 accelerates, and rises again fast afterwards when CO2 rises fastest. Our OMT curve shows the same trend until the mid-1980s and could qualitatively support a solar origin for the pre-1980 fluctuations ...."

___________Look, we're all hoping someone finds a way to reverse what's happening by building a spindizzy or tuning the HAARP or undoing half the knots in the cosmic string that appear to us as CO2 molecules in our atmosphere. But false hope isn't helping control that knob. Meanwhile ....

As far as his ethics go (how that ties into his scientific accomplishments, I'm not sure... there's plenty of Nobel Prize winners in Physics---e.g. Carlos Rubbia,---who often have very questionable ethical standards), and in any case, I'm afraid I'm going to have to remain properly skeptical of such claims until I see more substantive evidence of unethical behavior that just anecdotal accounts.

Hank: "pps, in Courtillot's 2007 reply I quoted above, he seems to agree, not deny, that increasing CO2 caused recent warming. Was he backpedaling?"

From what I've been able to tell (I really only know Courtillot from his erroneous claims about extinction events ;-) ), I think the answer is "no".

In the mean time I'm looking forward to substantiation of Jame's claims along the following "Alex, his behaviour in acting as editor "for dozens of papers by IPGP colleagues published from 1992 to 2008 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters" is quite clearly unethical and arguably renders him unsuitable to receive of an honour such as the Arthur Holmes medal."

I would also answer James question by saying "No, one judges a scientist on the merits of his work not his personal behavior, nor even for his behavior in professional organizations, when awards prizes." Otherwise where does the line get drawn? This person isn't PC enough on climate change, this person is too Republican, this person is too gay, etc.

OTH, if he got an award for his editorial behavior (assuming James accurately represented what Courtillot did..not saying James is lying , just that it's possible for *gasp* James to be mistaken), I think it would have been a good point.

Alexandre Grothendieck is a very famous (to put it mildly) mathematician who has rather seriously gone emritus [gone 'round the bend is more apt]. That isn't stopping the French from organizing a conference in his honor [although I haven't heard whether or not he is going to attend or even whether he is physically and mentally capable of traveling from his retirement cottage in the Pyrennees to Paris for the occasion].

Leaving aside the matter of Friis-Christensen and focusing purely on the ethics of Courtillot (I have no opinion on this as I don't fully understand why what he did is said to be unethical; for the sake of argument I assume it was a breach of ethics).

If he acted unethically, I agree that might be a reason that he should not be given this particular award.

I then want to ask about about some of the breaches of ethics seen in the Climategate email releases. Most agree that there is evidence that certain individuals acted unethically in various situations. Some of the scientists involved may be personal friends of yours.

Do you agree that these scientists should also be similarly barred forever from receiving certain awards?

James, the subject of ethics and the Climategate email release has been done to death and I don't wish to name the names all over again just for the sake of clarifying this question.

However, we all know there was a matter of deleting emails for the sake of evading compliance with the FOIA. Some scientists have confessed that they did indeed delete emails; there is no doubt that scientists were asked to delete emails explicitly for the purpose of evading compliance with the FOIA; and there are emails where scientists say they had already deleted emails, again for the purpose of evading the FOIA.

Now, there is the question of whether or not a law was actually broken, and that is a legal question. Separately, however, there is the question of whether this deleting emails business was unethical, regardless of whether or not it was illegal.

It is hard to see how it can be argued that attempts to evade the law, whether successful or otherwise, are not unethical.

Assuming we agree that this is unethical, does that mean the scientists involved should be forever barred from receiving awards?

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2008/12/inside-help-for.html is hysterically funny. Thank you for the pointer. Boosting one's compatriots (allons, enfants!) and busting those who do? Shocking!

You really should know that the cosmic ray flux:cloud nucleation theory has been around at least since the mid 1970′s (see for example Robert Dickson Solar Variability and the Lower Atmosphere. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 56, 1240–1248). It certainly isn’t Friis-Christensen and Svensmark’s theory!

It's always a little sad when the insights of past scientists are ignored and cast aside in promoting the efforts of late-comers...

Alex, note that I referred specifically to the AH medal - both in the original post, and then in a later comment - as being for more than science. I do think it should be difficult for anyone who had been convicted or officially rebuked for any serious ethical infringement to get such an award.

Note, that VC had been proposed for this award previously, but not selected in light of his unsavoury history. This time, it seems that the proposer did so by a somewhat unorthodox and secretive manner, such that objections could not be officially raised in time. The committee now pretends "we did not know about it" though they could hardly all have been unaware...

James: As was clear from my quote in the post, the AH medal is supposed to be about more than just the science.

Fair enough... but I don't know the EGU accepts this view. ;-)

"The Arthur Holmes Medal & Honorary Membership of the EGU, form one of the three equally-ranked most prestigious awards made by the Union, and they are reserved for scientists who have achieved exceptional international standing in Solid Earth Geosciences, defined in their widest senses, for their merit and their scientific achievements."

Simply being charged with something and not being found formally at fault wouldn't seem sufficient grounds in and of itself to disqualify one from such an award.

However, I note that in the article linked above by Hank Roberts, it is said that the allegations against Courtillot were circulated in an anonymous 100-page document. Given that both Courtillot and Allègre are climate skeptics, an obsessive 100-page document suggests they were targeted for their climate skepticism.

Courtillot and Allègre deny the accuracy of this document, and note that their role as editors was always declared.

Further, Courtillot apparently served on the editorial committee between 2003 and 2005, whereas a formal rule against his actions did not exist at Elsevier until 2006.

"Courtillot and Jaupart also say that their role on the editorial committee was explicitly to help publish French papers that, despite their high quality, might not otherwise have seen the light of day."

So it seems to be a matter of opinion as to whether or not what he did was unethical in any case. In all likelihood Courtillot himself doesn't agree that it was unethical at all.

All in all it looks like a beat-up to me. At the very least, Courtillot's side of this story needs to be considered.

> It is hard to see how it can be argued that attempts to evade the law, > whether successful or otherwise, are not unethical.

Actually that is very easy to argue. You only need to see, as I'm sure you do, that the correspondence between the law and the dictates of ethics is only very rough-and-ready even in old democracies. You can drive a truck of an argument through that hole.

> there is the question of whether this > deleting emails business was unethical

Yes, and that question has a clear answer from the professional ethics viewpoint: emails, or other material to which no outsider has a legitimate claim, can be freely deleted. If the emails were sent in the (perhaps naive, but sincere) expectation of confidentiality, precautionary deletion may even become an ethical duty.

And no outsider has a legitimate claim to pre-publication correspondence within scientific authoring teams, a principle recognized in FOIA legislation of some countries. The reason is clear enough: if correspondents had to formulate every single email as carefully as final papers, not a lot of collaborative authoring would get done. It would destroy the process as surely as would be the case with military or diplomatic secrets. Or competitive tenders. Or medical records.

This whole idea that "everything should be public" is only an ethical rule in libertarian la-la land.

There were no questions at VC's lecture today. He discussed climate in the last five minutes of his presentation, after discussing geomagnetic jerks and trap formation and mass extinctions.His opening argument was just silly: that the annual anomalies were small compared with seasonal anomalies.Then he argued that the pattern (but not the trend) in the global temperature series could be described as a set of 30yr linear segments, and that these in turn could be correlated with the PDO. There was no attempt to identify the ultimate cause for this correlation. Tsonis et al 2007 was recommended.Then VC moved onto the modulation between length of day and sunspot cycles, hypothesising that changes in wind speed were responsible. He could have shown some reanalysis data here to support this argument, but left it as conjecture. He finished with some quotes from Science arguing for the importance of debate in science.

> What people say about things they don't have any training in is worthless > of determining what they know about those things they have studied.

Well that it's worthless is something we can agree on Carrick -- and I must also credit you for assuming, as the kind soul you are, that these folks would be able to compartmentalize their proclivity to engage in this kind of dishonest nonsense. I am less sanguine.

...and by the way, calmly confident statements dissing a whole discipline of natural science without as much as an "I know it's not my field, but..." is anti-science. By definition.

Alex, I have the "100 page document" (actually 90), it is just a sheaf of pdfs of title pages from papers that have been both edited and authored by people from the same institute. VC appears several times, but he's not a particular stand-out in the affair. Oh, yes, the collection inludes one page of Elsevier's ethics policy stating clearly:

"Editors should recuse themselves (i.e. should ask a co-editor, associate editor or other member of the editorial board instead to review and consider) from considering manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or (possibly) institutions connected to the papers."

Carrick, the EGU did seem to find this sufficient reason to reject his nomination before, but this time someone seems to have engineered things such that they can claim not to know. I don't know all the details, of course (and no doubt there are several sides to the story).

Martin, to give an example, I think Claes Johnson's comments on the 2LT are idiotic or possibly a sign that he's got something organic wrong with him, but that doesn't mean I'll stop using his work in numerical analysis (e.g. his book on "“Numerical solution of partial differential equations by the finite element method" is a greater first course text).

I'm pretty sure I'm not the exception in that regards.

I think that he speaks about these topics. in the way he does. addresses issues of character, not science. (

James, hopefully you understand I don't really have an opinion on whether VC should have received an award. I would find a vetting of his own work more interesting, though, than comments on his ethical behavior. He may be one of these guys that got to the top through political machinations.

(I know a certain professor who came in as an assistant prof and found herself running a multi-million annual contract funded by a major US funding agency. Deference shown to her was more associated with her newly found power than with her to then non-existence publication record. Perhaps VC's "reputation" is more along this lines than legitimate scientific discovery. It'd be interesting to hear feedback from people in his own field what they think of this award.

(It did sound to me like somebody wanted to poke the climate science people in the eye when they awarded a prize to him, given the cloud of ethical issues hanging over him).